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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

In America today, you've got multitude of "us vs them" dynamics - anti-terrorist, liberal-vs-conservative, rich-vs-poor, black-vs-white, etc.

And at lot of this comes because, as the article says, "us versus them" is a powerful psychological dynamic. Given that that current American society is hyper-competitive, it seems likely this situation will continue. If pulling "us versus them" is akin to chemical warfare - a toxic affair for all concerned that only nets a marginal advantage, it will be used when actual chemical gets used - when one player is losing everywhere and no longer has to care. But that "pulling out all the stops" situation now happens ... always. When will politicians "go the low rout"? Always. When will media? etc.

Which goes back to hyper-competitive. When will it end? I don't know. How will end? Probably in tears but otherwise also hard to say.

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I feel pretty optimistic about this, in part due to methods and practices being worked out in Taiwan: https://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/

My assessment is that we've been building tech to help us FIND one another, but rarely building tech to help us BRIDGE with one another. With the former, we build ubiquitous messaging platforms, and so we can now find and spend time with more people who are more like us than ever before -- engaging in "candy" conversation with very similar people for more and more hours of our waking life. The latter, BRIDGING tools, would instead encourage and help us to break down those silo's that we're creating -- the silo's which are leaving us less and less prepared to engage with folks unlike us, who have perhaps developed whole other forms of language and culture in their own silos.

But as I said, Taiwan is experimenting with some really interesting processes that are breaking that down. Definitely worth reading the article :)

Unity against a common enemy has historically put an end to such internal strife. The Second World War wiped away domestic conflicts in the face of an existential threat, and gave a generation of men so much valor as to put them beyond reproach. It was unthinkable to target the men of the Greatest Generation with the kind of attacks and vicious reporting we are used to today, whether they deserved it or not.

Edit: I'm not saying we should go to war to solve our problems. I'm just observing something that is demonstrably true: groups unify in the face of external threats.

>The Second World War wiped away domestic conflicts in the face of an existential threat, and gave a generation of men so much valor as to put them beyond reproach.

This comment is ignorant of the reality of black military members, both during the war and after.

>This comment is ignorant of the reality of black military members, both during the war and after.

As I mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935787), this is because it was not voluntary problem solving. In the military you follow orders.

Research generally shows that working together voluntarily to solve a common problem, where each side needs the others' skills, really does reduce polarization.

Or, for that matter, Japanese-American citizens...

> This comment is ignorant of the reality of black military members

Sure, but the major internal strife within America in the late 20's wasn't based upon race, but upon economics and inequality. Just because it didn't remove _all_ strife within an entire nation(which will never happen) doesn't mean that it didn't smoothe things over for most Americans.

It doesn't last. The divisions remain and are simply put on ice for the duration of the greater threat.

> . Given that that current American society is hyper-competitive,

There is slight snag in there I think, because the level of competitiveness is also determined by culture, media, propaganda, education etc.

In other words it is not something that's just there, perceptions of competition is easily manufactured. Think of telling black people that illegal immigrants are taking their jobs. There is all of a sudden a politically motivated competition presented which can be used to make the two groups hate each other.

Of course competition isn't just-there. But that hardly means it's not there. Apartment rents don't go up whatever large percentage in a vacuum, for example, they have a context. But whatever the context, the competition for apartments if that happens is going to become more intense as more people fight for the fewer apartments that are in their budget.

Broad brush conclusions, of course, are hard to give full support to but I would still expect a large number of folks would say the US is now extremely competitive and has become more competitive over the last twenty and fifty years.

Edit: Also, competition is a bit like fame (if many people believe someone is famous, by the definition of fame those people can't be wrong). If many people believe a society is competitive, it makes the society more competitive because it impels the people to compete more.

> US is now extremely competitive and has become more competitive over the last twenty and fifty years.

I don't disagree. I was mainly trying to point out that competitiveness is also easy to manufacture, especially in the political arena.

"Us vs them" certainly isn't a weapon of last resort. White identity politics was at its peak when whites were least threatened by minority groups, and the same is true today with leftist identitarians. I wouldn't go so far as to say identity politics is caused by a powerful ingroup, but it certainly isn't caused by an oppressed ingroup.

Isn't this just the nature of reality though? A never-ending battle for resources and territory?

On time lapse, even tree roots are fighting for water, and leaves are fighting for sunlight.

I feel like this article might as well be called, "Overcoming Reality." Which the article basically admits, since these in-group / out-group distinctions are so deeply hardwired into our neurology.

Yes, cooperation works sometimes, but it's usually to beat out another cooperative group.

Hmm,

Levels of competition within a given collection of organisms is relative - the cells of the human only occasionally compete directly - in the rebellion known as cancer (which clearly isn't the norm).

Not all societies compete at the same level but levels of competition also depend on the level of technologies and resources available. English society didn't stay in permanent civil war when muskets were introduced but you can see situations where the introduction of muskets and potatoes cause civil wars in societies where they were introduced [1].

Now, in the US since WWII and especially since the 1980s, an increase in resources has been channeled to allow society to become more competitive. One could easily imagine that if this trend continues indefinitely, things may well reach the level of something akin to civil war.

Edit: whether one see cooperation as a mean of competition or competition as means of cooperation is kind of a matter of taste. An army facing another army can experience toxic levels of internal competition that prevents it from being effective against an enemy (or oppositely, it might experience a lack of "killer instinct" before the key moments I suppose).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars

I thought exactly as you did. But then I read this book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infini...

Your conception of "Reality" doesn't even include Zero Sum Games. Once you incorporate that, you can then look at the Finite and Infinite distinction.

The book is a tough read, but I guarantee you will love it, and will conclude that your model here explains 25% of "reality" at most.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Edit: The one star reviews on Amazon are hilarious.

The ‘rich-vs-poor’ division is no equivalence. This should need no explanation.

I think most of them are caused by the two-party political system in the U.S., where parties do make everything seem like an "us vs them".

For every proposal one party has, the other party tends to have the opposite proposal. Except when it's about giving the military bigger budgets, the NSA more surveillance powers, and expanding U.S. military operations in more countries. On those issues both parties are BFFs.

The two party system has got to go, if for no other reason than that it leaves very little room for the competition of ideas.

I think a preferential voting system would be the first step to dismantling the two party regime.

It would make it "safe" to vote for an independent candidate without people feeling like their vote was being thrown away. In time, that would lead to more specialized parties running.

I think for the most part it's the two party system that causes us to see the separate solutions as opposite rather than the other way around. It's hard to think of the trump tax plan as the exact opposite of a democratic solution because it has some measures democrats originally liked and some they originally proposed (although the core thrust of it is quite republican). We also still have it be the case that the majority of motions in house or senate get bi-partisan up-down votes.

Or perhaps most convincingly, as a former Canadian living in the US, I see the democrats as far to the right of the Canadian Conservative party (Canada's right wing party) on healthcare and the Republicans as some radical far-right. It's hard to think of the two solutions as opposites in any meaningful way because from a global perspective it seems like the Republicans want to do 3/100 on healthcare and most of the democrats try and stretch that to maybe 10/100.

This is often overstated. While there's certainly a lot of aspects of American government where both sides are to the right of Canada (or whatever social democracy you want to insert), it's by no means completely universal.

Take immigration - Canada has merit-based immigration with language requirements, and not a lot of tolerance for illegal immigration, which is considered firmly a right wing position in the states.

This just further proves how incoherent the entire unidirectional left-right spectrum is.

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